Making Our Communities Better Places to Live

At Jeni Webber + Associates, we share a love of community and nature. We believe that people are innately good and that together, we can create a better world—one that is healthier, more peaceful and more communal in spirit. It's why we love creating spaces in which people can come together—with friends and family, with neighbors and as communities. Through our public work, we hope to address environmental and food-justice issues, bringing healthy environments to underserved communities and encouraging environmental agency in underrepresented communities.

Benefits to People

Spending time in nature improves our lives. Whether sitting in a garden, walking through a park or hiking through a forest, it has the ability to enhance mental health, reduce stress and refresh our spirits. People who spend time together in ecological landscapes and gardens—whether children learning in an outdoor classroom, friends gathering on a patio for dinner, or neighbors growing vegetables in a shared plot—experience a stronger sense of community and belonging. Children make connections between the garden and science, ecology, health and nutrition, and return to the classroom refreshed and able to better focus on learning. And for children who grow up in cities, gardens often offer the only connection they have to nature on a regular basis.

Benefits to Communities

Cities benefit from gardens and ecological landscapes in other ways, too. Urban farms can transform abandoned lots into beautiful, productive spaces. In doing so, they can increase property values, reduce crime rates and increase well being. They also increase access to healthy foods and teach residents useful skills.

But gardens aren't just for people. They help restore some of the diversity of plants and animals lost to development. They provide habitats for songbirds, butterflies, bullfrogs and more. They can help improve air and soil quality, reduce rainwater runoff, improve water filtration, and reduce waste through composting. By mimicking and restoring natural processes in the environment through green infrastructure such as rain gardens and permeable paving, ecological landscapes reduce water treatment financial and energy costs and lessen harmful sewage overflows to the Bay and Ocean.

Benefits to the Environment

Our world is faced with unprecedented environmental challenges. Through development and by attempting to tame nature for our own comfort and well being; by wasting and depleting our natural resources; and by polluting our land, air and water, we have limited nature's ability to provide essential ecological services necessary for life, let alone to continue to accommodate our way of living.

For the healthy future of our Earth, we believe it is essential not only to focus on creating gardens and restoring the environment through ecological landscapes and green infrastructure, but also to raise children with a love for nature and an understanding of its importance in our lives. Collaboratively working with clients to create outdoor classrooms in our schools, gardens and restored landscapes is the most effective way we know to do that.

We hope you'll join us in this mission to bring people and nature together—to build stronger communities, to raise stewards of the environment, and to appreciate, respect and restore the Earth.